This Guy Has Made An Algorithm That Surfaces The Most 'Hidden' Tweets On Twitter

Twitter can be a great place for finding out what’s trending and what’s newsworthy. Especially if you follow a few key media profiles or celebs. But the thing is, your newsfeed can get quite crowded and some tweets are bound to go unseen. Particularly the ones that aren’t retweeted or favorited a lot.

Sure, you can manually go to specific accounts that you’re interested in to make sure you don’t miss a tweet, but depending on the number of accounts you follow, that can be pretty tiresome.

In comes AttentiveBot to the rescue. This Twitter account surfaced on Monday morning to solve your Twitter problems. AttentiveBot will calculate which are the least-looked at tweets from the people you follow, and tweet them to you in a link. All you have to do is follow @AttentiveBot.

The man behind AttentiveBot, Dan Phiffer, spoke to Business Insider about his motives behind AttentiveBot.

“In general, the bot comes from my interest in the idea of the ‘slow web,’ of finding strategies to uncover information that one might not otherwise seek out,” he explains. “Social media sometimes feels overly optimised for things that are big and noisy and demanding of your attention. AttentiveBot tries to counter those tendencies by keeping an eye out for people you follow who don’t tweet very often.”

The way AttentiveBot works is it downloads a list of all the people you follow on Twitter, and for each person it calculates a “quietness” score based on how long the account has been on Twitter and how many times they have tweeted. So someone who has been on Twitter for a week and has tweeted 7 times would have a similar score as someone who has been on Twitter for a year and tweeted 365 times.

That score is combined with the popularity of that person’s last tweet, ie. favourites and retweets. The algorithm only considers tweets that are up to one week old and it discards tweets that are “too popular.”

According to Phiffer, he may introduce some other rules as well. For instance, if you have favorited a tweet, you would not receive that from AttentiveBot. As of now, AttentiveBot only has 99 followers, but Phiffer plans on maintaining the account on a long-term basis.